Book Club Guide

Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi · 2019 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The unreliable narrative as the novel's entire structure — not just a device
Power and abuse in the world of teenage performing arts students
Who gets to tell the story — and what happens when someone else tells it differently

About this book

Students at a competitive performing arts high school in the 1980s fall in love, betray each other and are shaped by a charismatic drama teacher — and then the novel restarts, reframing everything from a different perspective, and again. Choi's National Book Award-winning novel is a formally audacious examination of memory, narrative authority and who gets to tell the story of what happened.

Published in 2019, Trust Exercise won the National Book Award for Fiction. Choi attended a performing arts high school and has described the novel as engaging with #MeToo-era questions about power, memory and whose stories get believed.

Discussion questions

The novel restarts partway through with a different narrative perspective that reframes everything in the first section. How does Choi manage this — and what does the reframing reveal about narrative authority?
The drama teacher Mr Kingsley wields enormous influence over his students, including through 'trust exercises' with troubling implications. How does Choi develop this — and how does the later section change how you understand the earlier one?
The novel is about people in their forties looking back at their teenage years — and finding that their memories don't match. What is Choi saying about memory, trauma and the right to one's own story?
One section of the novel is written by a character within the novel — a character writing about people from her own past. How does this nested structure work — and what does it say about fiction's relationship to lived experience?
Trust Exercise won the National Book Award. What does its formal radicalism achieve — and does the structural reveal feel like a satisfying culmination or a destabilising provocation?